Minutes 2026-04-02

Casey presenting an STL viewer in Google Sheets

• Not made for any particular reason
• Works pretty well
• Only uses "vanilla" Google Sheets
• Can set resolution of points, rotations
• Why It Was Made:
  • Casey did not know any languages outside of Gcode, Mcode, R, and Google Sheets
  • Came out of several experiments with Sheets in high school (barcode generator, data matrix generator, Animal Crossing flower breeding model)
  • Saw a video of a cube projection in Minecraft redstone
• How It's Made:
  • Initial version: rendered through layers of conditional formatting
  • Subsequent versions went towards using line graphs to load faster
  • Development went through phases, going through a lot of work and then being dropped for a while.
  • Switched to STL files for importing
    • Older versions calculated normals, but it turns out those are provided in STL format
  • Limit of 100 series in Google Sheets for plots
    • This means that for an 8000+ vertex model, it requires hundreds of plots, with backgrounds transparent, to render a whole model.
    • Various versions of this type of spreadsheet are done
    • Eventually Google came out with iterative calculations, allowing everything to be done in one series.
      • Allowed smaller size functions using lambda expressions, as spreadsheet size was becoming a constraint
        • This performed worse
    • Switched to scatterplots
      • Eliminates series limitations as there are no series
      • Did hit cell limit, requiring a separate page
      • Can adjust resolution of line rendering
      • Renders considerably faster
      • Calculates vertices and midpoints in separate sheets
  • Reinvented hashing accidentally to get a unique index for each vertex, to do indices
  • Modern version uses two layered scatterplots, uses the STL format